Rendering w/ MB Misfire Crashing

If I had hair, I'd be pulling it out. Hoping some of you folks can shine a light.

Bottom line is that I cannot render anything if I use Misfire's Dust or Splotches sub-effects. AE renders a few dozen frames and fails. If I don't have either of those two options checked in the effects window, I can select all the other Misfire sub-effects (but Post Contrast) and the renders run fine. When it crashes, Task Manager doesn't yield much (to me). CPU % hovers around 50%-85% depending upon how many sub-effects I've checked and RAM usage ranges from 12GB to 16GB. The log file always says "There is an error in background rendering so switching to foreground rendering...". It said this when I had only 8GB in the PC and repeats now with 20GB installed.

The project is taking a 3 layered PSD file, a 60 second 720p MXF from an EX1 that's being keylight'd and compositing/rendering them all to 720x480 std-def WMV or MOV.

My i7 PC has 20GB DDR3 and is running Vista Ultimate. I seldom have render problems unless I do some effects-heavy comps. Also seemingly irrelevant is enabling/disabling multiprocessing. When on, I have it set to 2 CPU's reserved, 3GB per CPU and it says 4 CPU's will be used. 4GB is reserved for other apps. I have fiddled with RAM and CPU balances to no avail.

I don't think it's the effects if these are from the Magic Bullet suite. But you don't mention your AE version, and that could be a big deal. Previous to version 10, long-gop footage such as that from an EX1 gives AE fits, and should be transcoded to a lossless codec before importing.

Another common trouble spot: using Open GL to accelerate rendering. It flat-out doesn't work well. If it's on, turn it off and leave it off like the Adobe employees do.

Sorry I didn't mention the version (it's listed in my profile). I'm using CS5x64. I am using MB suite but it's 1.4 - maybe that's the trouble. Perhaps I should trial the latest version. Should have thought of that before posting. I'll also try a lossless version of the input video and see if that helps - thanks for the idea.

Regarding OpenGL, I have read plenty of posts from Todd so I always have OpenGL off.

Yeah, I know Adobe says it solved the riddle of long-gop footage in AE 10+, but I still get a little gun-shy thinking about applying any effects involving time, or the seemingly-magic Rotobrush. Same thing for AE 10.5's Warp Stabilizer: things like that just seem like they'd work better with footage that has complete information for every frame.

While you're looking into updating Magic Bullet, don't overlook any updates to AE 10, either. What's it up to now? 10.0.2? 10.0.3, perhaps?

Just tried rendering an uncompressed AVI with only Misfire applied. Checked the heavy/noisy sub-effects and get the same result - render fails after a few seconds.

Also dusted off CS3 - MisFire renders fine with seeing only 4GB of RAM. So, seems like MB 1.4 and CS5 don't play nice together. Must be an x64 vs x86 thing. Not surprising, I suppose, given the time between their release dates.

I guess I'll have to try the latest MB trial version and see if that helps. I stopped updating after AE 10.0.1 because everything was just the way I wanted it (until I tried using MisFire recently).

Got the latest MBSuite trial (version 11) and same thing happens - as soon as I check "Dust" or "Splotches", individually or in combination with other MisFire sub-effects, the render fails after a few dozen frames.

Even updated to the current ATI drivers a few weeks ago when I upgraded to Vista Ultimate to use all 20GB.

Hi Kurt, if you have activated the "dust" option in the MisFire settings, remove it and try to render again. If this solve your problem you can use the dust effect with another plugin like MB Looks.
cheers!

I have similar problem. Don't know for sure by which parameter of Misfire it's caused by, but I'm sure it's Misfire's fault.

I have tried importing this comp to Premiere, but I get "Unknown Error" while rendering from PR.

My situation is bizzare, because I have pretty strong hardware (i7 3770 + 32 GB RAM + RAID-0) and the comp is very modest (720p, one layer png sequence with only Misfire applied). Only the lenght could affect the renders badly - the comp is 11400 frames long.

I render to PNG sequence, but from time to time I get an error (25 :: 241). It occurs randomly, after 1 to 500-600th frame. And recently - even the notifications stopped and render ...just fail on a random frames. Always those are different frames, and when I try to pick up render after the fail - the problematic frame isn't an issue anymore. Or sometimes it still fail on the same frame, and then I have to Purge Memory ("Ctrl" + "Alt" + "/" on keypad) and hit render once again - it usually renders the problematic frame then.